Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @01:46PM
from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

colinneagle writes "Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report is out and includes data gathered by its own forensics team and data breach info from 19 partner organizations worldwide. China was involved in 96% of all espionage data-breach incidents, most often targeting manufacturing, professional and transportation industries, the report claims. The assets China targeted within those industries included laptop/desktop, file server, mail server and directory server, in order to steal credentials, internal organization data, trade secrets and system info. A whopping 95% of the attacks started with phishing to get a toehold into their victim's systems. The report states, 'Phishing techniques have become much more sophisticated, often targeting specific individuals (spear phishing) and using tactics that are harder for IT to control. For example, now that people are suspicious of email, phishers are using phone calls and social networking.' It is unknown who the nation-state actors were in the other 4% of breaches, which the report says 'may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge. But it could also mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today.'"
The report also notes that financially-motivated incidents primarily came from the U.S. and various Eastern European countries.

I kind of envy having a government so willing to go to bat for its native industry that it's willing to go as far as to steal IP for them. In my country, the government is more than happy to sit back and watch all its industries outsource and lay off everyone, and nationalism is regarded as a bad word. China, if nothing else, believes in China.

they just have so many people and not so many things to order them to do. but imagine the disappointment when they spend two man years to phish something trivial they then notice they already had since they had been producing the fucking thing for five years!

aaanyhow.. even westerners would be better off bouncing their attacks through china.

What makes you think the US isn't doing the same? There have been complaints from European companies for decades that the US was spying on them, and it is safe to assume that anything worth stealing that China develops would be a target as well.

There was an article today about how China is well ahead of the US in renewable energy. China is deploying a deep water thermal differential power plant, the largest of its kind. China has faster trains than anything in the US, even if the signalling system isn't so

The difference is, in countries like China (and I think #2 is actually Israel, or at least they used to be WAY up there in espionage in the US)...it is state sponsored.

In the US, it is largely left up to the private industry. Any US spying, stays mostly in govt hands, things learned by the US govt isn't given freely to US industries.

Pure speculation, and not even "good" speculation. The fact is, you know very little about what the US Government does with it's data. The reason for this is that nearly all of the spying we do is classified as State secrets. I'd bet you a dozen donuts that the US does way more spying than China. Maybe not domestically, but our foreign espionage would dwarf China.

The difference is really, that you are told that China is full of bad guys. You are told that the US is full of heroes saving the world from

Your whole reply was pure speculation, unless the government has been giving you the memos, stop reading Mother Jones. You whole argument is that (1) you don't know what the government is doing, (2) therefore it is lying to you. Brilliant, Einstein.

I never claimed the Government was lying, I said that it's a fact our Government spies on people and we have no facts due to classifications for nearly every aspect of our espionage. Therefor, mister lack of basic English reading and comprehension skills, I did not speculate.

Me pointing out facts without the propaganda you normally get does not make my facts incorrect. It makes you look like an imbecile.

You believethat the US spying is all for the greater good. I make no such assumption. I never assumed

What makes you think the US isn't doing the same? There have been complaints from European companies for decades that the US was spying on them...

heh, I was talking with someone, Japanese-American, and she remembered way back when the Germans complained, "US takes our first-class scientists, Soviets take our second-class scientists, and we're stuck with third-class scientists!"

The difference is that from what I've seen of Asian corporate culture (I worked there for a couple years), it is not taboo to steal IP from competitors. In fact it's more or less considered normal albeit unspoken. It's not unusual for an employee who refuses to do it to be let go for other unspecified reasons.

You've seen the stories over and over. Like how the Chinese government required Siemens to contract with Chinese companies to manufacture high speed trains, then once the companies had "acquired" enough technical knowledge to do it themselves they dumped Siemens. It makes me facepalm every time I read about some naive Western tech company eager to do business in China bending over backwards to please the Chinese government, like lambs to the slaughter, thinking that a few pieces of paper promising their IP is safe will protect them.

In the late 20th century, this behavior was pretty much localized to the region. But now with the Internet, the behavior can reach around the globe. Those of you who think Western companies are the epitome of evil are in for a rude shock, once you see the no-holds-barred style of capitalism practiced in the East.

I kind of envy having a government so willing to go to bat for its native industry that it's willing to go as far as to steal IP for them. In my country, the government is more than happy to sit back and watch all its industries outsource and lay off everyone, and nationalism is regarded as a bad word. China, if nothing else, believes in China.

China is playing the Long Game, they've been at it for thousands of years. It should be no surprise you hear them say one thing while they vigorously do another, the hacking into Ameirican servers are merely there to throw the US off balance. Ultimately there is an opport

Oh we love, love, love Chairman Mao!He's our saviour, our martyr, moral compass and soulWe dream about him with each rice bowl!All the time he took, writing his little red bookHow much better he was than that old KMT schnookOh, we love, love, love Chairman Mao and howwwww!

unity to learn the weaknesses of western systems to build better defences against attacks.

I always think it is weird when people applaud China for playing the long game, when so many of their policies seem focused on making them look explosive in the short term but crippling them in the long term. The One Child policy for instance has created an enormous glut of working age people with few dependents that will become a tremendous burden on the country when they reach retirement age. The One Child policy combined with traditional values is also creating a tremendous imbalance in the genders, wi

The One Child policy for instance has created an enormous glut of working age people with few dependents that will become a tremendous burden on the country when they reach retirement age.

When you've got 1.3 billion people in a country the size of the US, overpopulation is a much bigger long term issue than having a high retiree/worker ratio for a while. If your productivity increases enough, a given number of retirees will actually be less of a burden on a smaller but more productive work force than they would be on a larger but less productive workforce. What do you think noodle robots are for?

The One Child policy combined with traditional values is also creating a tremendous imbalance in the genders, with almost 20% more boys than girls born.

That's a different story, though AFAIK the government's problem arises from an inability to stop

China has a lot of people, but it also has a lot of land area. The population density of China is 365 people per square mile, which puts it nowhere near the top worldwide. Compare this with Italy at 512 people per square mile or Germany at 609 people per square mile or the UK at 650 people per square mile. Neighboring Taiwan is all the way up at 1,849 people per square mile.

unity to learn the weaknesses of western systems to build better defences against attacks

Why bother? Big countries more readily destroy themselves than they can be attacked from the outside. That's how the US won the Cold War. Truman announced a containment strategy and eventually the USSR just imploded. Takes longer but it gets a lot fewer people killed that a hot war.

The US is happily destroying itself with its short-term self-parasitic thinking. Undoubtedly China will find a way to destroy itself from within (as it has many times in the past).

People joke and laugh about Chinese aggression, but please never forget, China is the oldest nation on the planet and arguably the second largest in size (depending on definition).

They have arguably existed in continuous (but evolving) national form since approximately 200 BC -- possibly longer if you consider the Qin takeover a civil war and treat the dynasties as more western city states.

You don't last 2000+ years as a nation without a long term plan.

I don't want to be fearmongering about Asian cultures -- but it is important to pay a potential foe respect where it's due. China knows what they're doing.

Also don't forget modern China is mostly populated and run by Han Chinese. Many of the earlier tribes of China were driven out by Han expansion and presently populate Southeast Asia and Japan. In claiming Tibet the government has effectively declared it lebensraum. Tibetans are already a minority in their own land.

China has fallen apart, and been glued back together, many times in the last 2000+ years. Emperor/Chinese party gets too greedy, peasants revolt, place falls apart for a few centuries, new peasant leader comes along and makes himself emperor (e.g. Mao) and it stays glued together for some time, until the cycle repeats.

I'll buy that they're thinking longer term than the US, but that's also true of a hyperactive three year old. No country thinks 2000 years ahead. BTW Egypt has been around a lot longer and has at least as good of a claim to continuity.

They have been at it for +2000 years and they still come in 2nd place to a country that has been a going concern for 250 years. China is facing the inevitable consequences of creating a growing economy. Their only advantage in world trade has been their reliance on cheap labor and not quality or innovation. This is why China is borrowing technology from everyone and not giving a damn about things such as patents. They now have to compete with other countries in South East Asia because they also can use lowe

I realize you were probably asking this in jest, but Verizon Business Security is independent of their cell phone business. What happened is their investigators got pretty darn good at rooting out hackers, both internal and external. Helping customers find external hackers in their networks led them to offering these investigation services to other corporations. I'm pretty sure that their security team is a profitable self-sustaining division these days.

The most important thing to the rest of us is they created a schema for recording incidents, and they publish the data (after anonymizing it.) With the number of investigations they perform, it becomes a statistically significant source of information about breaches, which had been a real black hole of information before.

Most companies are reluctant to announce anything about their breaches. They're always negative publicity, they lead to accusations of wrongdoing or incompetence, and they may reveal other sensitive internal information about the kinds of data they keep. By being anonymized through the DBIR, we all get to learn much more about the threat landscape without being able to blame a specific company for a specific loss.

I have a dumb question: If your company does not depend on doing business with China, why not block their entire country within your firewall? My current company has no dealings with China, so I've blocked their national IP address range. My spam/attacks have gone down almost 90% since doing so. I did the same with Russia and most of the former Soviet nations.

At some point, you realize that the only time you ever communicate with that part of the Net, is when you're receiving an attack of some sort. Before long, "The Great Firewall of China" isn't going to be something installed by the Chinese government; it's something the rest of us will have done.

Hmm... maybe that was the government's devious plan to combat internal dissent and external influences, all along!

Yup, sounds like a remarkably effective and easy plan. Many computers there have Windows "so [they] could be useful" [slashdot.org], and 5 will get ya 10 that they're not "Genuine" and also unpatched, so China can take control of them and send attacks through them (or just change the logs on the hacked PC to trace back to the compy of the unsuspecting Evil Capitalist Pig who said one too many bad words about their boss-slash-covert domestic spy on social_media_outlet). The CCP has Evidence(tm) to forced-labor the Pig, U

While watching ssh brute force on some of my systems I found myself blocking whole subnets based in China. I also discovered some in the US. Long before this one of my machines (old slax bootable CD) at home had been attacked itself and used as a stepping stone for hacker for the few hours it had gone unnoticed, a slow internet has the advantage of when I hacker was on it would get unbearably slow. I rebuilt that machine even looking for MBR trojans. However a sufficiently fast internet might not be bogged

Yes. They work for Verizon. As long as their funding comes from Verizon, their first mission will be to serve Verizon. If you think their disclaimer, their admission of bias, is a reason to trust them, you're making a mistake.

Especially about issues regarding security, it's never a good idea to trust people who have an agenda that is not directly tied to anyone's security but theirs.

Once and for all: corporate ways are not our ways. corporate benefit is n

Well for me it's the politically motivated weasel words: "China was involved in 96% of all espionage data-breach incidents"
This means even if it was a Repulsive Russian or Clever Canadian hacker using a Chinese box as a relay, and a toolkit that Chinese folk have used before then "China" was "involved". Which is bullshit.

Let me tell you of a story of the town that has the highest drug related arrests in the county: I was pulled over for speeding, and briefly arrested for possession of drugs. I was trave

Sorry. Just a little skeptical here. I don't doubt that China does its share, but I'm guessing that it's pretty easy to make it look like an attack is coming from China even if it originates from Boise, Idaho.

I must be stupid, because to my understanding, the IP addresses an attack originated from is highly likely not the IP addresses of the attackers. I mean, there are things such as proxies, bots, zombies, etc.
The only way to figure out where the attacks really came from is to go upstream at least one level and conduct forensic analysis of those machines. I am almost certain that Verizon didn't do that.